March 15 reflections

Exactly 37 years ago, on the Ides of March, I moved from Chicago to New York to work as John Coplans’ assistant at Artforum. At the CAA convention in Chicago a couple of months before, manning the booth for The New Art Examiner, I met Coplans and asked him to let me know if he heard of a job in New York. Mind you, I had no intention of moving anywhere; I said it because I wanted to appear worldlier than my young, green, Midwestern self. I wanted to see what it would feel like to be someone who would actually say things like that. 

So when Coplans called and offered me the job I was stunned. He also gave me only three days to decide and ten days to get myself there. My children were in Chicago, living with my husband—how could I leave? But my artist friends were insistent. At the time Artforum was the sun that rose and set on the art world; it was like being invited to Oz by the Wizard himself. A creature of the suburbs and married at 19, I didn't know New York, had never been to the museums and galleries I’d read about, so decided that if I could find a place to stay, I’d go for a couple of months and treat it like a work/study program. Coplans could always find another assistant.

When I called Spanish artist Àngels Ribé, who’d spent time in Chicago, and asked if she knew of an apartment, she said she was looking for a roommate. It seemed meant to be—except Àngels lived on the Bowery. My friend, Barry Holden, had visited her there, so I asked him, “Aren’t there like bums and stuff on the Bowery?” “Oh no,” he said, “it’s been gentrified. There are galleries and boutiques all up and down.” (This was 1976.)

My friends who worked at the Museum of Contemporary Art packed my stereo system like art and I took it on the plane with me, along with my suitcases (those were the days!). When the taxi dropped me off in front of 331 Bowery, Àngels didn’t answer my ring, and as I waited, my boxes attracted the curiosity of the denizens of the street who surrounded me. I looked around for the galleries and boutiques but didn’t see any. Maybe they were on the next block. I tried to drag my belongings into the ground-floor shop but the owner wasn’t having it. Could I use the door that entered into the hallway? “It doesn’t work,” he said, “hasn’t since the fire.” When was the fire? “Last Thursday.”

Finally Àngels came bouncing down the street in the company of one of (I found out later) a string of handsome boy friends, and they helped me take my things upstairs. The next day, having stepped over a drunk on the floor of our foyer, I took the subway to the Artforum offices on Madison Avenue. When later I asked Coplans why he gave me so little time to make the move, he said, “I knew if I gave you more, you wouldn’t come.” And when, after having searched the Bowery from one end to the other, I asked Barry about the galleries and boutiques, he said, “I knew if I told you the truth, you wouldn’t go.”

JOHN COPLANS, Self portrait, (SP 8 88), Front Hand Pinched,1988, photograph, ed. 12, circa 52x64cm

Best Chelsea art day ever

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT
Untitled (Julius Caesar on Gold), 1981
Acrylic and oil paintstick on canvas
50 x 50 inches  (127 x 127 cm)
© The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat/ADAGP, Paris, ARS, New York 2013

Every year at this time my friend, Terry Perk, comes from England with his students from the University for the Creative Arts and I take them on a gallery tour of Chelsea. Last year the art was so bad I was embarrassed for New York. This year it was a feast, although really, the Basquiats alone would have made the trip worthwhile. Terry says they don’t really know Basquiat in England; there have been no major shows, and the printed images give no indication of their power.

Basquiat had a formidable effect on my life – to the point that in the mid-1980s I stopped painting and withdrew from the gallery I was about to join. I envied the freedom in his work and hated what I saw as orderliness and constraint in mine. I thought, “If I can’t do that, why bother?” My absence from the studio lasted only a few months, but I would not show for another ten years, which was how long it took me to learn to appreciate what was, if uncomfortably, indelibly mine. My method was to make paintings so personal that no one would be interested in exhibiting them. Proof of this is that my first painting from that time, All the Numbers in My Head includes my Social Security number and my AmEx number. I had used writing in my paintings since 1976, but often it was obscured. Now, since I was sure no one was going to see them, I could be more revealing. Eventually they turned into paintings derived from my journals that were ultimately shown at the same gallery I'd been talking to ten years before – although that was pure coincidence since, in the interim, the gallery had a complete change of personnel. Seeing the Basquiats today, those spooky Boettis down the street—preceded by the work of Suzan Frecon and the late Alan Uglow, artists with whom I’ve had connections in the past—is almost too much to process. All of those exhibitions I’ve now been to several times, each visit more satisfying than the next, as well as the transfixing video by Ragnar Kjartansson at Luhring Augustine, with whom my relationship is, at least as yet, uncomplicated.

Carol Diehl, January, 1997
Oil on canvas, 36" x 36"

To see:

John Byam / Edlin / 134 Tenth Ave. / thru 3/16

Alan Uglow organized by Bob Nickas / Zwirner / 519 W 19 / thru 3/23

Suzan Frecon / Zwirner / 525 W 19 /

Matthew Weinstein; Elger Esser / Sonnabend / 536 W 22 /

Alighiero Boetti / Gladstone / 515 W 24 /

Ragnar Kjartansson / Luhring Augustine / 531 W 24 / thru 3/18

Andrew Masullo / Boone / 541 W 24 / thru 4/27

Jean-Michel Basquiat / Gagosian / 555 W 24 / thru 4/6

Thomas Nozkowski / Pace / 508 W 25 / thru 3/23

Thomas Nozkowski (drawings) / Pace / 511 W 25

Anthony McCall; James White / Kelly / 475 Tenth Avenue @ 36

Boetti and me

The Alighiero e Boetti exhibition is at Gladstone Gallery until March 23^rd, and I have been twice. My life has been full of so many unexplainable synchronistic events that I don’t know why I should be surprised when another crops up, but my relationship to this artist is one of the spookiest. As I wrote previously, I didn’t know Boetti’s work until my dealer at the time, Frank del Deo of Hirshl & Adler, pointed out that some of my paintings were nearly identical to his. This was in 1995; Boetti died in 1994. Of course I looked up his work, and—yikes!—it was like looking at myself. The configuration, the colors, the stylized letters were the same—the only difference was that the Boettis were embroidered and mine were painted. Okay, it could just be those few paintings, but the more I learned about Boetti, the more similarities I found. At the recent MoMA retrospective, for instance, I discovered that he had employed the same way of writing script over script to obscure it that I had, and that he made works with round Avery press-on labels – which I have drawers full. The physical proportion of all of our work is nearly the same. Even the pieces I didn’t do anything like feel familiar, like something I could have done had I followed the thread. This time at Gladstone I found walls full of small pieces that echo a moment in my life when I made small square gridded paintings with friends’ names as gifts….every time I see a piece of his, it’s a shock, like unexpectedly catching a glimpse of myself in a mirror. And what does it all mean? Absolutely nothing. That’s the weirdest part.

Carol Diehl, Journal of a Year, 1995, oil on canvas, one panel of four, each 80" x 48"

OGGI VENTICINQUESIMO GIORNO OTTAVO MESE DELL ANNO MILLE NOVE 100 OTTANTOTTO ALL AMATO PANTHEON INCONTRI E SCONTRI (1988), embroidery on fabric; 40 1/2 x 43 1/2 inches (102.9 x 110.5 cm). Courtesy Gladstone Gallery. 

The week in review

At the CAA: A lively, meaty panel on “Art Criticism and Social Media” chaired by Phyllis Tuchman, with Walter Robinson, Sarah Douglas, Lindsay Pollock, and Barry Schwabsky, where Walter Robinson tweeted throughout, looking up only to ask, “What was the question?”  (I thought it was a hilarious commentary on the topic, although some stuffier members of the audience got their knickers in a bunch about it)…Facebook was compared to a modern day equivalent of the Cedar Bar, but happily more egalitarian and less sexist…one questioner lamented that art criticism doesn’t pay, to which Barry Schwabsky commented that it is a counter to economic rationale, was never really a true profession but something people do because they can’t help themselves….another asked how she could get traffic to her “small blog.” The most prominent Facebooker in the audience generously suggested that she post it on his page (anything that gets attention he leaves it up, otherwise, he takes it down) and there was some discussion of tweets, etc. but no one mentioned CONTENT, which is the way things really happen. You can tweet until kingdom come, but if it’s not interesting, no one will read it, whereas if it is, you can be re-tweeted into history—which is the beauty of the Internet.

Again, in another panel, more talk about the “how” rather than the “why” or “what”—this is where I want to start screaming, in Donald Trump fashion, “CONTENT, CONTENT, CONTENT!”—but Lindsay Pollock did address the importance of editors. So much writing on the Web, even when pretty good, lacks cohesion and focus. The irony is that the content that's written with the most thought and care—that in art magazines—gets the least distribution and dies an early death if it’s not archived online.  

I walked past a booth flaking a “low residency PhD,” which tempted me for a moment, thinking how much fun it could be to go from no degree to a PhD and study theory and philosophy in an organized way, but immediately scotched the idea when I attempted another panel that opened with an incomprehensible presentation by a chaired Harvard professor, a specialist in African and African-American art who, among other flubs, could not correctly pronounce “Basquiat” or “Cote d’Ivoire” (“Bas-kee-yay” and “Coot Deever”—eek!).

The CAA job mill was humming, as usual, with interviewees scurrying about or sitting on the floor at the Hilton making last-minute touch-ups to their resumes, but—you read it here—I give the art school bubble another 10 years, maybe only five. With the move from professorships to low-paying adjunct positions, it’s unlikely students will put up with high tuition rates when the only jobs they can expect at graduation pay next-to-nothing and offer neither benefits nor security. At least there will be no need to complain anymore about the academization of art—the academies will simply kill themselves.

Beyond the Hilton there was art to see: speaking of Basquiat (that’s “Bas-kee-yat”), a humongous museum-style show at Gagosian, Suzan Frecon’s lovely Tantric-like studies at David Zwirner, the sumptuous Boetti embroideries at Gladstone, and a sign of progress at Gavin Brown where, at the artists’ request, there were NO press releases available. Hooray!

Suzan Frecon
for a large painting – (malachite color), 2007
Watercolor on old Indian ledger paper
Framed: 15 3/4 x 18 1/2 inches (40.01 x 46.99 cm)
Paper: 9 3/4 x 12 1/2 inches (24.8 x 31.8 cm)

On Wolfgang Laib, Ken Johnson, and pollen at MoMA

Art began with religion. Only recently in human history have allusions (other than cynical) to spirituality in art become an anathema among intellectuals.[1] It’s this prejudice that drives Ken Johnson’s peevish Times review of Wolfgang Laib’s installation in the atrium at MoMA—although where Johnson finds “a quasi-religious dimension” in a simple rectangle of sifted pollen is baffling.

But there’s more: “Don’t call the cleaning crew; that yellow spill is art,” shouts the headline, which most likely wasn’t written by Johnson, but a headline writer who, regardless, was inspired by his sentiment. Is it possible that a critic can still—in the 21^st century—be made uncomfortable by art that doesn’t have a narrative, and is neither made with traditional artists’ materials nor hung on a wall?

“It’s like a big, Rothkoesque painting displayed horizontally,” Johnson says, while giving no indication as to whether this is a good or bad thing. Maybe a Rothko’s okay, but something similar made with another material on the floor, is not? Or perhaps Rothko isn’t okay either. He did, after all, make paintings for a chapel.

We will never know because Johnson never establishes his point of critical departure. He doesn’t indicate, for instance, what previous works of Laib’s he’s seen, and how this one measures up. Nor does he compare Laib with others who have attempted to bring aspects of nature indoors, such as Robert Smithson, James Turrell, or Olafur Eliasson, a younger artist who might have been inspired by Laib to create his floors of lava stone or walls of Icelandic moss—not to speak of the minimal and color field painters, from Robert Ryman to Rothko, to Kazimir Malevich (his White on White of 1918 especially comes to mind[2]), who may have been an influence.

Instead Johnson chooses to find Laib “obviously much indebted” to Joseph Beuys, although the only “obvious” similarity is that Beuys was also a German who used another of Laib’s signature materials, beeswax; the narrative and strong socio-political agenda that’s overtly stated in Beuys is significantly lacking in Laib, who neither teaches, writes, nor lectures. Further, to link Laib with Beuys and Marina Abramovic as another “performance artist” cultivating a “cult of personality” is a bit far-fetched, as Beuys’s and Abramovic’s personal participation is intrinsic to their work whereas Laib’s “performance,” if you can call it that, consists of a three-minute video describing how the MoMA piece was made.

In the video, we see a gentle man who likes to spend time in nature. He is not sanctimonious, nor does he make any claims for his work. The most philosophical Laib gets is to say, “pollen is the beginning of life.” How this portrayal could produce such antagonism is mystifying. When Johnson writes, “I do not mean to doubt his sincerity; I am not calling him a charlatan,” of course he is implying exactly that. By referring to Laib’s “seeming modesty,” “carefully-groomed saintly charisma” and describing him as a “canny, professional purveyor of New Age hokum,” Johnson wants us to believe that Laib is a huckster who figured out 40 years ago that the ticket to international art world fame and fortune would be to develop a self-effacing personality, live in a remote part of Germany and collect pollen. Canny indeed!

I am reminded of my mother who was so literal-minded that she would not have been able to see the poetics in a rectangle of pollen, and assumed that anyone who dressed or acted differently from those in her suburban milieu was showing off. And, yes, her frustration at not being able to see what others saw made her angry.

No one says that a critic has to like an artist’s work. However it’s his responsibility to his public to provide a heightened level of observation, place it in a cultural context, and from there evaluate whether or not it succeeds—as well as, hopefully, be a bit ahead of his audience.

Instead, Johnson may be lagging. Recently a petition was sent to The New York Times complaining of racist and sexist comments in two reviews, an action which, like the Times in its response, I found inappropriate. However it’s surprising to find such obliviousness and, here, an apparent lack of research[3], in the writing of a critic of his stature.

Perhaps meditation would help. Hardly an invention of the New Age, and far from the trance-inducing “altered state” Johnson supposes it to be, meditation requires being fully present and observing of one’s environment and thoughts. With practice the meditator learns to distinguish between reality and imagination, between what can be immediately perceived and what’s simply the mind scurrying about, assigning meaning and making assumptions.

Sometimes a field of pollen is just a field of pollen. Or at least it’s a good place to start.

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[1] It makes me think that perhaps the artificial division between “folk art” and “fine art,” as recently discussed by Roberta Smith and Jerry Saltz, came about partly because “folk art” does not recognize this separation.

[2] Part of the MoMA collection, Malevich's painting can be seen in the museum’s current exhibition, “Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1926.”

[3] While his take might still be negative, I feel this would have been a very different story if the author had spent more time with it.  One factual quibble is that Johnson says Laib “gave up” his medical studies in 1974 when Laib did, indeed, complete his degree. It’s in the wall text.

More: A thoughtful review here, by artist Altoon Sultan, and another video.